The invention relates to printing apparatus and more particularly to a so-called wire printer which makes data impressions in the form of a mosaic pattern of dots produced by the wires of the printer as the form, such as connected tickets, on which the printing is done travels longitudinally across the ends of the wires.
Previous wire printers have been capable of printing fractions. Such wire printers generally have included a row of seven print wires each actuated by an electromagnet and capable of producing the digits of a fraction together with a diagonal line between the digits indicating that two consecutively printed digits together constitute a fraction. Each of the digits were of normal size, that is, the same size as alphabetic characters also printable by the printing mechanism; and the slash mark between two consecutive digits utilized the same printing width as each of the digits.